Have you heard of the newspaper that predated the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner? It's known as the San Francisco Call, although it had a handful of name variations over its fifty-plus year lifespan.
Today we're talking about the Morning Call, the iteration of the paper from 1878-1895. The Sunday special edition of the paper during this time was called the Sunday Call.
Read More about the Morning Call
Most of the issues are not lost to the sands of time: at SFPL, the Magazines and Newspapers Center has this newspaper available in our microfilm collection; in fact, the newspaper is almost fully digitized on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America database and the California Newspaper Digital Collection (CNDC). That's a big win for historians and researchers looking into 19th century and early 20th century California.
However, one stubborn issue was elusive: the October 16, 1892 Sunday Call is nowhere to be found in these digital repositories or in our microfilm.
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| Calendar view of digitized issues of the Morning Call from the CNDC with a red circle around the missing October 19, 1892 issue. |
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| Box housing the microfilm roll of the September and October issues of the 1892 Morning Call. The box has been annotated to indicate the October 16 issue is missing. |
Last week the Magazines and Newspapers Center got an incredible opportunity to address this elision when a representative from the Los Angeles Public Library delivered a bound volume of the Morning Call containing issues from the last four months of 1892, September, October, November, and December. A patron had donated it to them, and it being in bad condition and outside of their geographic interest, they reached out to SFPL to see if we wanted it. After some quick research, our team of amazing library assistants and library technicians was able to identify that this missing issue could be part of the bound volume on offer. We agreed to accept the very large tome measuring 20" x 25" even though this breaks with our typical practice of not accepting donations. (We leave that up to the SF History Center, and even they didn't want it!) Upon carefully unwrapping the tome and opening up, one Magazines and Newspapers Center librarian said, "Seeing the issue was so exciting! I felt like Indiana Jones, like we were the only people on earth to see it after all these years! Like a lost monument hidden in the desert."
LAPL had warned us: it's in bad condition, and they were right. That's to be expected on almost anything printed on paper in the second half of the 19th century, when paper was manufactured from wood pulp high in lignin content and was therefore acidic, quickly becoming brittle. That's why we don't have print copies of historic newspapers at the Magazines and Newspapers Center, instead offering the newspapers on the more stable format of microfilm. Due to the extremely brittle nature of the Morning Call in the bound volume, this object will not be available to the public.
But, we carefully digitized the elusive October 16, 1892 issue of the Sunday Call for posterity. While we are still working out a permanent way to make this digitized issue more accessible, we present to you now a sneak peak. Enjoy!
The Asian American Journalist Association
is a 501(c)3 nonprofit educational and professional organization with
more than 1,500 members across the United States and Asia. Since its
founding in 1981, AAJA has been at the forefront of change in the
journalism industry.
Harry Mok
is an assistant editor in the opinion section of The San Francisco
Chronicle. Previously, he was a copy editor at The Chronicle. Harry has
also worked as an online producer for the Bay Area News Group, as an
editor at Newsday in New York and is a former editor in chief of Hyphen
magazine. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Jose State
University and a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of
Journalism.
Ko Lyn Cheang
joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2024 to cover Asian American and
Pacific Islander communities from the Indianapolis Star, where she had
covered city government and housing since 2021. She got her start at The
New Haven Independent covering criminal justice and the pandemic and
has reported for the Jakarta Post and VICE News. Her work on the Indiana
jail deaths crisis, evictions, substandard housing conditions and other
reporting has been recognized by the IRE Awards, Goldsmith Prize, and
the Connecticut and Indiana Societies for Professional Journalists. She
graduated from Yale College as a Yale Journalism Initiative scholar with
a philosophy major.
Han Li
is a reporter for The Standard covering the city’s diverse Asian
American communities. Born and raised in China, Han is fluent in
Cantonese and Mandarin. He graduated from Sun Yat-sen University with a
degree in journalism and holds a master’s degree in public
administration from the University of Southern California. Previously,
Han wrote for the World Journal, a national Chinese-language newspaper.
He brings his bilingual reporting skills to The Standard. When not
reporting, you can find Han checking out the Bay Area’s regional Chinese
cuisine and immersing himself in Chinese American history and politics.
Ravi Kapur,
who you probably recognize from his time at KGO-7, is an award-winning
journalist and the founder and CEO of Diya TV, which provides
programming geared toward South Asian Americans. Diya TV is now the
largest South Asian broadcast television network in the nation,
providing relevant news, information and entertainment to the diaspora’s
next generation. It can be watched for free with an antenna on San
Francisco channel 30.1. 
